Being able to monitor the circuit breaker and retry metrics is of great value, but even more important is the capability to define automated alarms on these metrics. Automated alarms relieve us from monitoring the metrics manually.

Grafana comes with built-in support for defining alarms and sending notifications to a number of destinations. In this section we will define alerts on the circuit breaker and configure Grafana to send emails to the test mail server when alerts are raised. The local test mail server was installed in section Installing a local mail server for tests.

In the next section, we will define a mail-based notification channel that will be used by the alert in the section after this.